Re: [ubl-dev] Availability of UBL-1.0-SBS-0.5 XPath files

["Stephen Green" <stephen_green@bristol-city.gov.uk>]

Folks

My personal view of the UBL SmallBusinessSubset:

UBL 1.0's Small Business Subset (SBS) now in development at version 0.5
results in a radical (up to 99%!) reduction in the number of overall elements
and attributes to support (though of course there is much repetition of
the underlying common structures in the full UBL documents). The subset
starts to guide a developer of the type of application used by a small business
(perhaps from a sophisticated spreadsheet to a typical finance application)
into what elements and attributes and their structures to support as a 
minimal yet acceptable implementation of UBL. It seeks to establish some
commonality across such applications, necessary for certain types of
electronic trading, by giving the opportunity for applications to conform to
an agreed subset appropriate to their needs. The acceptance of this kind
of UBL support from the wider UBL developer community may result in
applications for larger businesses being designed to better cater for the
limitations small business applications may face. Besides this, there may be
scope, hopefully, for ebXML CPPs/CPAs and related standards to specify the
requirement to use a subset such the SmallBusinessSubset in trading
collaborations/messages.

One outcome of the subset's development is the ability to provide designed
example instances, either as empty templates or as filled examples to aid
a user in producing a valid UBL document.

The attached zipped file contains sets of such instances which comply with
the 0.5 version of the Small Business Subset. Note: there is no difference in
the namespaces of the subset example instance from a UBL-proper instance.

Compliance, as presently proposed, allows further elements from UBL to be
included in a document but with the understanding that a similarly compliant
receiving application MAY ignore such elements which are not included in
the subset. On the other hand, elements which the subset does include
SHOULD NOT be ignored unless the application has good reason to do so.
These rules should provide a certain degree of confidence that a UBL message
will be understood even by a low-end conformant application. Some sort
of exception handling could be built into applications to detect extra-subset
elements and present these visually for a user to make necessary decisions.

Just how well the existing subset can meet the above function remains to be
judged but efforts have been made to conform to models developed for
such purposes as well as the historical benefit of years of development having
gone into the existing set of UBL documents from which the subset is derived.

It would be good to receive comment from domain 'experts' on the content 
of the attached documents and their appropriateness for small businesses. 
Thank you.

Regards

Stephen Green


 

>>> "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com> 25/01/05 14:21:01 >>>
Good day, all,

I've just posted a revision to the proposed Universal Business Language 1.0 
Small Business Subset 0.5 XPath files:

   http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-hisc/200501/msg00010.html 

Public comments and feedback are welcome ... please use this mail list to 
offer your input.

................. Ken

--
World-wide on-site corporate, govt. & user group XML/XSL training.
G. Ken Holman                 mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com 
Crane Softwrights Ltd.          http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/u/ 
Box 266, Kars, Ontario CANADA K0A-2E0    +1(613)489-0999 (F:-0995)
Male Breast Cancer Awareness  http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/u/bc 
Legal business disclaimers:  http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/legal

xml.zip